{"id":185747,"date":"2021-05-31T12:00:37","date_gmt":"2021-05-31T11:00:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=185747"},"modified":"2021-05-27T04:46:26","modified_gmt":"2021-05-27T03:46:26","slug":"fact-checking-takes-another-beating","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2021\/05\/fact-checking-takes-another-beating\/","title":{"rendered":"“Fact-Checking” Takes another Beating"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Fact-checkers are great, but the media business keeps trying to solve its credibility problem by misrepresenting what they do.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a>

The soul of rectitude testifies in the Senate<\/p><\/div>\n

25 May 2021 – <\/em>The news business just can\u2019t stop clowning itself. The latest indignity is an international fact-checking debacle originating, of all places, at a \u201cfestival of fact-checking.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Poynter Institute is perhaps the most respected think tank in our business, an organization seeking to \u201cfortify journalism\u2019s role in a free society<\/a>,\u201d among other things through its sponsorship of the fact-checking outlet PolitiFact. A few weeks back, it held a virtual convention called the \u201cUnited Facts of America: A Festival of Fact-Checking<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

The three-day event featured special guests Christiane Amanpour, Dr. Anthony Fauci, Brian Stelter, and Senator Mark Warner \u2014 a lineup of fact \u201cstars\u201d whose ironic energy recalled the USO\u2019s telethon-execution of Terrance and Phillip before the invasion of Canada in South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut. <\/em>Tickets were $50, but if you wanted a \u201cprivate virtual happy hour\u201d with Stelter, you needed to pay $100 for the \u201cVIP Experience.\u201d<\/p>\n

During the confab, PolitiFact\u2019s <\/em>Katie Sanders asked Fauci, \u201cAre you still confident that [Covid-19] developed naturally?\u201d To which the convivial doctor answered, \u201cNo, I\u2019m not convinced of that,\u201d going on to say \u201cwe\u201d should continue to investigate all hypotheses about how the pandemic began:<\/p>\n

httpv:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=sELaURSW_7o<\/p>\n

Conservatives in particular were quick to point out that Fauci last year said, \u201cEverything about the stepwise evolution over time strongly indicates that [this virus] evolved in nature and then jumped species.\u201d At that time last May, of course, the issue of the pandemic\u2019s origin had already long since been politicized, with Donald Trump\u2019s administration anxious to point a finger at China for causing the disaster. Mike Pompeo went so far as to say there was \u201cenormous evidence<\/a>\u201d the disease had been created at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Fauci was touted as a hero for pushing back on this and many other things.<\/p>\n

Fauci\u2019s new quote about not being \u201cconvinced\u201d that Covid-19 has natural origins, however, is part of what\u2019s becoming a rather ostentatious change of heart within officialdom about the viability of the so-called \u201clab origin\u201d hypothesis. Through 2020, officials and mainstream press shut down most every discussion on that score. Reporters were heavily influenced by a group letter signed by 27 eminent virologists in the <\/a>Lancet <\/a><\/em>last February<\/a> in which the authors said they \u201cstrongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin,\u201d and also by a Nature Medicine <\/em>letter<\/a> last March saying, \u201cOur analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct.\u201d<\/p>\n

The consensus was so strong that some well-known voices saw social media accounts<\/a> suspended<\/a> or closed for speculating about Covid-19 having a \u201clab origin.\u201d One of those was University of Hong Kong virologist Dr. Li-Meng Yan, who went on Tucker Carlson\u2019s show\u00a0last September 15th to say \u201c[Covid-19] is a man-made virus created in the lab.\u201d After that appearance, PolitiFact \u2014 Poynter\u2019s <\/em>PolitiFact \u2014 gave the statement its dreaded \u201cPants on Fire<\/a>\u201d rating.<\/p>\n

About a half-year later, in February, 2021, the WHO made a visit to China. Apparently some of the delegation left with a few doubts about the natural origin of the virus, even though the WHO\u2019s report declared a lab-origin theory \u201cextremely unlikely.\u201d From there came a procession of scientists demanding that the lab origin possibility be taken seriously, including a letter signed by 18 experts in <\/a>Science<\/a>. <\/em>When the Wall Street Journal <\/a><\/em>came out with a story<\/a> that a previously undisclosed U.S. intelligence report detailed how three Wuhan researchers became sick enough to be hospitalized in November of 2019, the toothpaste was fully out of the tube: there was no longer any way to say the \u201clab origin\u201d hypothesis was too silly to be reported upon.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s not to say the \u201clab origin\u201d theory is correct, at all. However, that\u2019s irrelevant to issue at hand. Despite what you might have been led to believe, fact-checkers don\u2019t exist to get things right 100% of the time. They\u2019re there as a threadbare, last-ditch safety mechanism, which news organizations employ as a means of preventing public face-plants.<\/p>\n

In any case, by May 17, just days after its \u201cFestival of Fact-Checking,\u201d Poynter\/PolitiFact had to issue a correction to its September, 2020 \u201cPants on Fire\u201d ruling on the \u201clab origin\u201d story, writing:<\/p>\n

When this fact-check was first published in September 2020, PolitiFact\u2019s sources included researchers who asserted the SARS-CoV-2 virus could not have been manipulated. That assertion is now more widely disputed. For that reason, we are removing this fact-check from our database pending a more thorough review.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Fact-checkers probably saved my career on at least a dozen occasions. When I was just starting to report on Wall Street, Rolling Stone <\/em>often had to assign multiple people to to go through every line of my articles to make sure I didn\u2019t make a complete ass of myself. I joked once that an RS <\/em>fact-checker nearly flunked the infamous line about Goldman, Sachs being \u201ca great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood-funnel into anything that smells like money\u201d by correctly pointing out that squids don\u2019t have blood-funnels. That happened, but the bulk of the work those poor checkers did for me was a lot less humorous and more thankless. The person who had to review my pathetic explanation of a Structured Investment Vehicle (SIV) in this article<\/a> probably deserved hardship pay and a lifetime supply of Thorazine. Like all writers I complain about fact-checkers, but I\u2019d be the last one to say their jobs aren\u2019t important.<\/p>\n

However, the public is regularly misinformed about what fact-checkers do. In most settings \u2014 especially at daily newspapers \u2014 fact-checking, if used at all, is the equivalent of the bare-minimum collision insurance your average penny-pinching car renter buys. There\u2019s usually just enough time to flag a few potential dangers for litigation and\/or major, obvious mistakes about things like dates, spellings of names, wording of quotes, whether a certain event a reporter describes even happened, etc.<\/p>\n

For anything more involved than that, which is most things, fact-checkers have to scramble to make tough judgment calls. The best ones tend to vote for killing anything that might blow up in the face of the organization later on. Good checkers are there to help perpetuate the illusion of competence. They\u2019re professional ass-coverers, whose job is to keep it from being obvious that Wolf Blitzer or Matt Taibbi or whoever else you\u2019re following on the critical story of the day only just learned the term hanging chad <\/em>or spike protein <\/em>or herd immunity. <\/em>In my experience they\u2019re usually pretty great at it, but their jobs are less about determining fact than about preventing the vast seas of ignorance underlying most professional news operations from seeping into public view.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, over the course of the last five years in particular, as the commercial media has experienced a precipitous drop in the public trust levels, many organizations have chosen to trumpet fact-checking programs as a way of advertising a dedication to \u201ctruth.\u201d Fact-checking has furthermore become part of the \u201cmoral clarity\u201d argument, which claims a phony objectivity standard once forced news companies to always include gestures to a perpetually wrong other side, making \u201ctruth\u201d a casualty to false \u201cfairness.\u201d<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s how Amanpour put it<\/a> at the Poynter Festival:<\/p>\n

[Objectivity] is not about taking any issue, whether it be about genocide, or the climate, or U.S. elections, or anything else happening around the globe \u2014 Covid, for instance \u2014 and saying, \u2018Well, on the one hand, and on the other hand,\u2019 and pretending there is an equal amount of fact and truth in each basket\u2026<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Amanpour went on to note her career took off reporting in Bosnia, where one side was being \u201caggressed\u201d and another side was not, and it would have been an offense against decency to say otherwise. This is a nod to the \u201cobjectivity doesn\u2019t mean giving equal time to Republicans\u201d bit that has become so popular in the industry of late (Fox institutionalized the same argument in reverse three decades ago).<\/p>\n

But objectivity was never about giving equal time and weight to \u201cboth sides.\u201d It\u2019s just an admission that the news business is a high-speed operation whose top decision-makers are working from a knowledge level of near-zero about most things, at best just making an honest effort at hitting the moving target of truth.<\/p>\n

Like fact-checking itself, the \u201con the one hand and on the other hand\u201d format is just a defense mechanism. These people say X, these people say Y, and because the jabbering mannequins we have reading off our teleprompters actually know jack, we\u2019ll let the passage of time sort out the difficult bits.<\/p>\n

The public used to appreciate the humility of that approach, but what they get from us more often now are sanctimonious speeches about how reporters are intrepid seekers of truth who sit next to God and gobble amphetamines so they can stay awake all night defending democracy from \u201cmisinformation.\u201d But once you get past names, dates, and whether the sky that day was blue or cloudy, the worst kind of misinformation in journalism is to be too sure about anything. That\u2019s especially when dealing with complex technical issues, and even more especially when official sources seem invested in eliminating discussion of alternative scenarios of those issues.<\/p>\n

From the start, the press mostly mishandled Covid-19 reporting. Part of this was because nearly all of the critical issues \u2014 mask use, lockdowns, viability of vaccine programs, and so on \u2014 were marketed by news companies as culture-war narratives. A related problem had to do with news companies using the misguided notion that the news is an exact science to promote the worse misconception that science is an exact science. This led to absurd spectacles like news agencies trying to cover up or denounce as falsehood the natural reality that officials had evolving views on things like the efficacy of ventilators or mask use.<\/p>\n

When CNN did a fact-check on the question, \u201cDid Fauci change his mind on the effectiveness of masks<\/a>?\u201d they seemed worried about the glee Trump followers would feel if they simply wrote yes, so the answer instead became, \u201cYes, but Trump is also an asshole\u201d (because he implied the need to wear masks is still up for debate). By labeling whatever the current scientific consensus happened to be an immutable \u201cfact,\u201d media outlets made the normal evolution of scientific debates look dishonest, and pointlessly heightened mistrust of both scientists and media.<\/p>\n

Fact-checking was a huge boon when it was an out-of-sight process quietly polishing the turd of industrial reportage. When companies dragged it out in public and made it a beast of burden for use in impressing audiences, they defamed the tradition.<\/p>\n

We know only a few things absolutely for sure, like the spelling of \u201cfemur\u201d or Blaine Gabbert\u2019s career interception total. The public knows pretty much everything else is up for argument, so we only look like jerks pretending we can fact-check the universe. We\u2019d do better admitting what we don\u2019t know.<\/p>\n

______________________________________________<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Matthew C. Taibbi is an American author, journalist, and podcaster. He has reported on finance, media, politics, and sports. He is a contributing editor for <\/em>Rolling Stone, author of several books, a winner of the National Magazine Award for commentary<\/em>, co-host of <\/em>Useful Idiots, and publisher of a newsletter on <\/em>Substack.<\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 taibbi.substack.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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